Triple Fine: Day Of The Tentacle Special Edition Announced

Double Fine have announced that their Remastered re-release of fine point 'n' clicker Grim Fandango will launch on January 27th, then completely overshadowed that with a casual mention that they're also working on a 'Special Edition' of Day of the Tentacle. Crumbs! Whatever 'Special Edition' means, the classic LucasArts adventure game will have one next year. Day of the Tentacle was a fine game, but one I got stuck on in my idiotic youth and never finished; here's my chance. What's so special about this version is a mystery for now, as it's announced and little more, but a mystery we can jab and guess at.

Double Fine are bringing Day of the Tentacle: Special Edition to PlayThings too, so one imagines it'll have a new user interface at least. The original had the classic SCUMM big list of selectable verbs - Give, Pick Up, Use, Open, Look At, Push, Close, Talk To, and Pull - that I know some remember fondly but I wouldn't miss. The big question for me is what they'll do to the graphics.

When LucasArts made 'Special Editions' of the first two Monkey Island games a few years back, they redrew them entirely in a painterly style which sorta worked (I'd prefer them more colourful) and put in an option to switch between new and old with a button's press. Perhaps this might do something similar. Heck, rumour had it they started on DotT and were almost finished when LucasArts closed; I wonder if this is related.

Crumbs, while I'm at this remembering lark, DotT is the sequel to Maniac Mansion - and MM creators Ron Gilbert and Garry Winnick are currently crowdfunding a new "spiritual successor" to MM of their own. With ten days to go, they're sitting awfully pretty on Kickstarter.

If you have no idea what all this tentacle nonsense is about, well, it's a game about children travelling through time to stop a purple tentacle from taking over the world. It is very funny. Here, John wrote a retrospective for Eurogamer a few years back and gave us nice load of screenshots. And here's Schafer playing DotT and chatting about it in 2012 as part of the 'Double Fine Adventure' documentary:

And here's a new Grim Fandango Remastered trailer to go along with that word of a release date. It'll bring improved lighting and textures, director's commentary, new control schemes (hooray!), and the ability to buy it at all without trawling for used copies on ugh physical media.